Colorways by Vicki Welsh

These are 2 quilts that belong to my cousin’s son, Matt. The one on the left was made by my Mom in 2008. We had a quilt book that had you cut out and sew blocks in a way that you got 2 quilts from one. We each made one of the quilts, mine is here.

The one on the right is much older, probably 1960’s era. Neither Mom or I recognize it but Debra, my cousin, thinks that it was either made by our shared Great-Grandmother or her paternal Grandmother. After working on it, I’m convinced that it was made by our Great Grandmother. She made a lot of 8-pointed star quilts and I have a bunch of the unfinished 8-pointed stars and used some of them to back a baby quilt that I made for Debra’s Grandson. You can see that at the end of this page. This quilt is totally hand pieced and not all that accurately. Additionally, it’s hand quilted in the Baptist Fan pattern, which is what she used for all of her quilts. So, I’m declaring that it was made by Flora Texas Goad Rakes sometime in the 1960’s. In the later part of her life she lived 6 months in Fieldale with my Grandmother and 6 months in Galax with another daughter. I guess this one was made in Galax.

Anyway, they ended up with me because they both had a lot of damage. He loves both of the quilts and really wants to keep them. I agreed to give it a try.

I worked on this yesterday because I’m still awaiting the extra bin of clothes for the memory quilt. Today, after errands, I’ll start taking apart the shorts and pants that I have already. But, I was glad to have time to get these two quilts repaired yesterday. I not only marked that task off my list but we defrosted the extra freezer too!

This was a very rudimentary repair. This quilt is not a heirloom. It’s the bed quilt that he uses all the time so my job was just to put it back together. Mostly I just needed to topstitch some seams closed but it also needed a few patches. I did use vintage feedsack fabrics to keep them the same age but these are the first machine stitches that this quilt has ever seen.

I had this one fabric that had shredded like old silk does. Fortunately, this is the only piece of this navy blue in the whole quilt. I just top-stitched a new fabric over it.

Here’s another big patch and there was an additional patch put over that ripped tan stripe.

It turned out that 80% of the repairs were in these 2 blocks in the center of the quilt. The original patchwork is so haphazard that my new patches barely show up. I doubt if Matt will even notice. I know that what he loves best about this quilt is the yellow fabric and that’s all still intact.

The star quilt took about 4 hours to do the repairs. The batik quilt only took about a hour and a half. The problems with this quilt were much more severe than the star quilt. The binding was a mess but the worst problem was this striped batik that was used in the border. I think the dye used had just eaten that fabric up and the entire border looked like this. I had already offered and given him a replacement full size quilt. I wasn’t willing to remove the binding, restitch and requilt the borders. But I was willing to cut it down to a smaller quilt that he could use on the sofa and he was amenable to that.

On top of the border and binding problems, it had 2 holes in the quilt and these holes went through all 3 layers. I’m guessing that one of his dogs might have caused this damage. Fortunately they were on the same row of blocks.

This is what’s left and it measures about 39″ x 70″. It’s a very odd size but will probably be a fine sofa quilt. He’s a small guy and very skinny so this might work for him.

Neither of these repairs will win any awards but he should get a few more years of use from the quilts.